Stephen Girard: One-Eyed Cabin Boy Who Underwrote the War of 1812

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Stephen Girard was born Étienne Girard in Bordeaux in 1750, the son of a sea captain. He lost the sight in his right eye at eight, went to sea as a cabin boy at 10, and was a licensed captain by 23, trading between New Orleans, Port-au-Prince and New York. In May 1776, dodging a Royal Navy blockade, he put into Philadelphia by chance and stayed, opening a grocery and liquor shop and marrying shipbuilder's daughter Mary Lum. In 1790 he committed Mary to the Pennsylvania Hospital, paying for every comfort, and took mistresses for the rest of his life. Unclaimed cargo of about $10,000, left on his ships by French planters fleeing the Haitian Revolution, became working capital.

He financed China voyages that included opium smuggling until 1824 and used Pennsylvania's gradual abolition law to keep an enslaved woman, Hannah, until his death. In the 1793 yellow fever epidemic he stayed when the elite fled and nursed patients at the Bush Hill hospital himself. In 1812 he bought the expired First Bank of the United States and opened Girard's Bank, then underwrote up to 95 percent of the federal war loan. He died on December 26, 1831, at 81, worth about $7.5 million.

Pennsylvania law barred associations from banking without a charter but never anticipated one individual doing it alone.
A "Stephen Girard job" meant being paid to move a pile of bricks and then move it back.
At 80 a wagon wheel ran over his face, and he got up and walked home.
The Supreme Court upheld his will in Vidal v. Girard's Executors in 1844, founding Girard College in 1848.
He left Judge Henry Bry a Louisiana plantation along with 30 enslaved people.

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